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towed behind another car – fake bollards that pop unexpectedly out of the roadway, automated remote control inflatable deer that run out in front of you, boxes that suddenly fall off trucks. The research er distracts the driver in the following car by asking him or her to tune the radio, and then the startle event occurs in front of them, and they must react. Looking at this response is what our research is about. The experiment can be used to test brake lights, forward collision warning systems, and/or drivers’ responses. If there is a collision, little damage is done. The hardware group gets to build all of these things and figure out how to make them work – it’s great fun. What projects are next for your center? A lot of research and development needs to be done on automated vehicles, such as: How does the human take over control? What should be done in emergency situations? How do you compensate for non-automated vehicles driving around you? Reliable pedes trian/animal/object detection needs to be developed. Does the car steer around a hazard or just pop out of automated control to let the human deal with the hazard? All these topics and more need to be studied and design guidelines and standards developed, then reli able technologies need to be invented to ensure the safe designs and implantation of full automation in vehicles. It’s VTTI’s desire to be on the cutting edge of this new human-machine interface design problem. What do you enjoy most about being at VTTI? I like the atmosphere. It is fun to be part of a research group that’s at the cutting edge. And personally, I enjoy the mechatronics of it all – computer control, moving motors with computers, and looking at and analyzing the data.

VTTI Profile: Andy Petersen, Director of the Center for Technology Development

What brought you to VTTI? Tom Dingus and I worked together at the Center for Computer Aided Design at the University of Iowa. Tom was associate director, and I was the hardware group lead. When he became director of VTTI and needed a hardware guy, he asked me to come to VTTI. I felt comfortable coming here because I knew Tom was a rainmaker and soft funding would not be a problem. How has your work evolved? When I arrived, the center had a tape measure, a hammer, and a screwdriver. I worked out of my home for the first three years be cause I had the tools suitable for electronic design. The hardware group enables research. We evolved the data ac quisition system [DAS] to be more easily instrumented and better tailored to do human factors research. Tom’s ability and my ability to play off of each other’s strengths has resulted in custom hard ware for human factors research that is pretty unique. The DAS used in the 100-Car Study is about the size of a piece of carry-on luggage. Our group built the circuit boards and used PC hardware from the space program, which is pretty old technology now. The most recent technology, the MiniDAS, is about the size of a sandwich. In some ways it does more, although it has two cam eras instead of four. What are some other technologies your center has created? We have created a number of technologies for use on the Smart Road. If a car company wants to test a warning system’s impact on a driver, you want the test to be on a closed test course in case the driver is startled and steers off the road.

A golden scenario is when the driver is looking away from the road and you trigger an event in front of

them. We have all kinds of fun toys to cre ate “startle events” for drivers: a surrogate target – a fiberglass shell of the rear of a car that is on bicycle wheels and is

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photo by Steven Mackay